Introduction, Background, and my Goals

Street Art, W Alabama, Houston (Houston Street Art)

Other than blogging space, I want to address a specific audience of community college students, and even more specifically with students in the Aldine and Spring area of north Harris County. After a few years of professing writing studies and rhetoric studies, I have found overarching learning:

1. Students can write, and even powerful, and even effective.
2. Students have an enormous resource of experience, discursive environments, and rhetorical heritage; yet
3. Students are often silenced by their resources, which I will throughout argue because
1. Our rhetorical environment silences our families and
2. Our public schooling system designed to silence students and
3. Our college community is unprepared to draw upon those rhetoric resources for effective writing for all

So, for I craft this little blog space so that I can better articulate my own teaching experiences, offer feedback from students (my first prioritized stakeholder), and suggestions so that students can survive in the maze of a community college. 

Today's politicized education expects a fair disclaimer -- that I don't represent any institutional official policies or stances. I'll want to discuss issues of academic freedom to help students understand how education limits student success, so look forward to that. 

Look forward to topics such as

1. Stress
2. Resources on campus and off campus
3. Networking with students, faculty, and staff
4. Using family resources to understand pressure in college
5. Balance of family, personal relationships, college, work, and recreation
6. Technology resources to bridge the college and community.
7. Writing -- what it really is, and why most people in college misunderstand it
8. Rhetoric -- how to empower the family in the community
9. On-line resources for self, academic, and community
10. And responses to student needs

I hope students will participate with responses (with or without names) and to ask students to write guest blog writers, as we collaborate and make the college community stronger.

Resources

Houston Street Art. 2013. Web. <http://houstonstreetart.blogspot.com/>.